The door of the print shop on Mill Road sticks in wet weather, so regulars give it a shove with one shoulder. Inside it smells of ink and machine oil, and the only sound is the slow clack of a press working through a run of wedding invitations. The shop has printed on Mill Road for longer than anyone on the street can remember, and it is now the last letterpress printer in Northgate.
There are two presses. The older one is worked by a treadle and stands in the window, where people on their way to the station stop to watch it. The other has a motor, though it is hardly new: it came second-hand from a printer up the coast who was closing down, and it took a weekend and a borrowed van to get it here.
'People think it is slow,' says Wren Hollis, who took the shop over from the family who ran it before. 'It is slow. That is the point. You choose every letter, and you can see where the paper has been pressed.'
An apprentice who answered a card
The shop's one apprentice, Kit Barnes, started in the summer after reading a handwritten card in the window. The first weeks went on sorting loose type back into the right drawers. 'I thought I would be printing straight away,' Kit says. 'Instead I learned the alphabet again, backwards and upside down.'
Most of the work now is wedding stationery, and the waiting list for invitations runs into next spring. Wren keeps it in a ledger on the counter rather than online, and turns down jobs that have to be done in a hurry. Business cards, posters for the Mill Road traders and the odd book of poems fill the weeks between weddings.
Now and then the shop holds an open studio, with the date on a card in the window. Bring your own paper, Wren says, and you can set your name in type and print it yourself.